[ducttape12]

Can someone explain to me why coronavirus is getting so much coverage? According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people. Each year smoking kills 480,000 people in the US. In two days smoking will have killed more people in the US than coronavirus has worldwide.

Shouldn't we have headlines about this every day? Or any of the other far more deadly things (traffic accidents, heart disease, suicide, etc.)?

(I'm not trolling, I honestly don't understand why this is different.)

[tharne]

It has to do with catastrophic risk and the fact that pandemics follow a power law distribution instead of a normal one. The deaths from things like smoking or auto accidents are normally distributed with very very small deviations around a known mean. Smoking may kill 480,000 Americans per year, but there's never a year where it will kill 10X 100X or 1000X that number.

Pandemics tend to follow a power-law distribution, like earthquakes, where you have small outbreaks here and there and then one comes along at 100X or 1000X the magnitude of anything ever seen before.

Even people who don't have a statistical understanding of power law vs. normal distribution usually have a good intuition of it, which is why most people worry about terrorism more than one would if they were just looking at just the total number of deaths vs. something car accidents or smoking.

What makes the coronavirus so terrifying is power-law component and the unknown unknowns. We still don't have a good handle on basic things like how exactly how contagious it is, how deadly it is, and how long it will take to run its course. Sure, it could end up being equivalent to a "bad flu", but it could also become a repeat of the 1918 Flu or worse.

[helen___keller]

> Even people who don't have a statistical understanding of power law vs. normal distribution usually have a good intuition of it, which is why most people worry about terrorism more than one would if they were just looking at just the total number of deaths vs. something car accidents or smoking.

I think this is a poor example, by any measure terrorism is an irrational concern for Americans, it's nothing like a pandemic that could actually affect the whole country.

[tharne]

Not irrational, since, like pandemics, terrorism involves a lot of "unknown unknowns". You're thinking past terrorism attacks == future terrorism attacks, which is the wrong way to look at it. It's not a linear concept like auto accidents. Deaths from terrorism can jump around wildly from year to year. You can have zero deaths from terrorism one year and one million the next. That's how certain phenomena work. Others are linear and it's important not to confuse the two.

[jerf]

Indeed, while I haven't seen anyone even theorize that COVID-19 is a terrorist attack in the darkest rumors I've seen, it's the sort of thing you need to worry about if you let a terrorist organization ever got far enough to produce one of these things, which is a completely realistic concern.

To my eyes, COVID-19 looks like a single source that is spreading like wildfire, but, imagine this was a deliberate attack. Things spread fast enough on their own; consider how fast this would be spread if there was an organization doing it on purpose. What if this basically appeared in every major US city simultaneously?

[wonderwonder]

It has the ability to affect the global economy in ways that the others dont. If people don't want to go to work due to an increased risk of mortality, business will shut down. If everyone is forced to go to work and they all get sick and are unable to work for several weeks, business shuts down. Finally if everyone gets sick and 3% of your workforce then dies, that again causes massive economic disruption. This is also occurring on a time scale far shorter that people getting sick from smoking or heart disease.

[ducttape12]

But couldn't the same thing apply to traffic deaths? In 2018, in the US, over 36,000 people died in car accidents. That's higher than coronavirus deaths, so logically shouldn't we all stay off the roads and quit going to work? Wouldn't that have the same impact?

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-traffic-deaths-...

[wonderwonder]

Sure, and I think it is a good comparison in that the numbers are large and it is unexpected. The difference is that we as a society have come to regard them as an acceptable risk. In addition, they are isolated, so while they are common, the odds of 10 people you know dying in a car crash are very low. With a virus, an entire office could get sick or even worse an entire school. For me this is my primary fear. My kids entire school gets infected and kids start dying or being hospitalized in large numbers.

This also adds to the economic impact. Its the clustering aspect of this that drives fear and uncertainty.

[WillPostForFood]

It is disingenuous to compare last years total traffic deaths to total coronavirus BEFORE coronavirus has spread. The coronavirus deaths haven't happened yet.

If I told you due to a newly discovered automotive manufacturing defect, 2% of cars would explode and kill the occupants, and 20% of drivers would be hospitalized in serious condition, that wouldn't be worthy of being on the front page of every newspaper?

[vzidex]

Something like traffic deaths - which occur fairly routinely and regularly - are probably already factored in by large companies (i.e. companies expect N people to leave every year, of which M might be unexpected deaths).

The new coronavirus hasn't been accounted for yet by our society, and probably can't be accounted for given that we don't know how far it will spread and how many will die.

[lm28469]

Too bad life is all about work and world economy... I guess we'll have to wait a bit for the PS5 and the next iphone, how sad.

[wonderwonder]

? Its hard to live without shelter,food and water. All cost money, which in turn is a product of the economy and work. It you are saying that everyone should be guaranteed all 3 regardless of work that is another conversation, but not really the reality of today.

[furi]

If I had to guess it's uncertainty. If coronavirus infects half the world by the time it's run its course that would be 77 million people dead, on top of however many normally die in that time frame. I have no idea how likely a 50% infection rate is but it's a lot more likely than an equivalent 11x jump in the rate of deaths from smoking over the same time span.

[rubidium]

Because smoking has been in the headlines, but it's not news anymore that it's killing so many. The editor of that newspaper would get fired for making that a headline everyday.

It is news that there's a new flu-like virus emerging, spreading, and having a relatively high rate of mortality.

[bryanrasmussen]

People also discount things that will probably kill them decades from now in a horrible way if they don't change their behavior instead of things that will maybe kill them weeks from now in a horrible way if they're unlucky.

[bthrn]

If you touch a smoker, you don’t get lung cancer and risk death.

The hype for this is part media sensationalism, part risk of it spreading everywhere.

[timruffles]

Because the number of death from smoking or traffic accidents doesn't grow exponentially, as they're not caused by an infectious disease. You don't go from 100 lung cancer cases to 80,000 within a matter of weeks.

Also, consider second order effects. What happens to hospitals when you get 20k cases of something in a month, vs 20k over a year.

[AnimalMuppet]

Part of it may be volition, and part may be time, and part of it may be the unknown.

If I die from smoking, it's probably because I smoked. (Yes, I know that some people can die from second-hand smoke, but it's by far the minority.) And if I die from smoking, it's from smoking for 10 or 50 years, not from one cigarette.

With Covid, though, I can die because someone at my work went the wrong place on vacation. And I can die in days, not in years.

And, Covid today kills fewer than smoking. That may not be true in a year, though. So part of the focus is because the potential is there for it to be an objectively bigger killer than smoking.

[itchyjunk]

Not smoking might be a solution to one of those problems but not coronavirusing isn't for the other.

[BoiledCabbage]

Exponential Growth

[doubleunplussed]

It's the same with terrorism - when random attacks seemed to be growing in frequency but were still not super common, it was the same question. They might not grow exponentially, but they appeared to be growing in some manner.

My answer now is the same as then: fear is about the future!

[topkai22]

For why we are collectively concerned about a good comparison is influenza (flu), which kills millions worldwide each year and has a case fatality rate of around 0.1%. I believe flu is the single deadliest pathogen worldwide currently.

Covid-19 appears to be extremely virulent and at least as lethal if not several orders of magnitude more so than influenza.

The immediate reason why is Covid-19 is getting so much attention compared to flu in the news media is that it is new. However, some of the reason why it’s getting so much attention from public health officials is that

1) it’s not well understood yet, and the upper bounds currently on virulence and lethality are very high

2) it appears virulent enough that it could become endemic in humans, meaning that we could be dealing with annual epidemics like the flu.

[WaltPurvis]

> a good comparison is influenza (flu), which kills millions worldwide each year

That's a slight exaggeration. The number is in the hundreds of thousands, not millions.

[topkai22]

You are right, except on exceptional bad years. Apologize, had the higher number in my head.

[yk]

I guess because somewhat bad diseases make good news. When you discover a new disease, then the mortality will be quite high, because you only see the cases so bad that people went to specialized hospitals, while you don't know anything about all the people with light cases, they just take a day off from work and never bother a doctor.

Once you are past the "new and incredible deadly disease" headlines, the disease is news, because it was previously reported in the newspaper.

Contrast that with a well known disease like the flu, the initial headline is not there because a flu wave is not news, if it is not a once in a decade bad flu season. (And note, once in a decade bad is only known at the tail end of the flu season, not at the start.)

[collinmanderson]

It kills 2-3% of the people it infects (within days, not years) and it's very contagious. If it spreads throughout the US, that's 6-9 million deaths in the US alone.

[ibdf]

I would be ok, if you had compared coronavirus with the flu we have learned to live with, which kills way more people each year... but smoking? is smoking transmitted over the air? If someone smokes next to you, then you will also start smoking? Do you die from smoking in a few days?

Coronavirus is on the news because we can't control it, we can't see it, it can spread without show of symptoms, it can be deadly... has no vaccine - thus the fear of a pandemic.

[guramarx11]

smoking is not contagious, a smoker can't infect or kill you directly with cigarettes

[ducttape12]

Except that according to the CDC, second hand smoke causes 41,000 deaths per year in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

[nickjj]

> Except that according to the CDC, second hand smoke causes 41,000 deaths per year in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal....

The thing with second hand smoke is your senses can warn you of this danger before it's a threat.

You can often see someone smoking before you can smell the smoke. You can also smell the smoke if you happen to not see them and then choose to react to the situation. You can either continue inhaling that smoke or walk about 30 feet in any direction away from the source to put yourself out of danger.

But with this virus, you don't have such luxuries. It's invisible, tasteless, odorless and can kill you after being exposed to it once. That's pretty much as scary as it gets.

[guramarx11]

you need to be exposed to second hand smoke for long periods of time before it can kill you, the covid-19 exposure take considerably less time in comparison, then again are they really comparable at this point?

[nathanyukai]

well because people are used to those figures and it won't grab people's eyeball anymore. While coronavirus can potentially kill a lot more people if it becomes a global break out.

[ducttape12]

So it's what I'm thinking, it's the news hyping it up to get clicks, ad impressions, etc? Seems kind of irresponsible to get the public into a frenzy just to make money.

[oska]

> it's the news hyping it up to get clicks, ad impressions, etc?

No. You've already had several good answers on the difference between multiplicative & systemic risk vs additive risk. That's the reason that people are taking this outbreak seriously and why it is getting significant media coverage.

[empath75]

> According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people.

It's mostly isolated to 1 province in China. If you extrapolate those deaths world wide, you're talking 10s of millions of people dead if it goes pandemic.

[lm28469]

You can't really extrapolate things like that though. Try extrapolating west virginia diabetes related death to the world and we'd be fucked too.

[empath75]

I don't know that this needs to be said, but -- diabetes isn't contagious.

[tim333]

West virginia diabetes is not rapidly spreading around the globe just now.